The Posthuman Movement
= <<< Follows Chapter One: The InterPlanetary Migration = At the end of Mother Earths tenure as the sole home of the living being, Mass migration was not the only solution posed to the great human problem. There were plenty of intellectuals who ridiculed the concept; high minded visionaries who saw the industrial mega-machines of the corporate migrators as nothing more than derivative sci fi role play for super-rich teens. For some, humanity's route to freedom lay not in the sky-piercing machoism of Von Braun but in the careful genius of Babbage and Turing. Theirs was a growing movement, and it was all about going full digital. Digitalism built on technology familiar and prevalant in everyday society, but quietly awaiting its final form. The more we interacted with our artificially intelligent servants, the smarter they became. It was an understanding shared among technologists and consumers alike that this technology would go on exponentially improving and solving all kinds of problems, from a total revolution in medical diagnosis to intelligent urban planning, but none of this broached that huge, terrifying, ultimately philisophical question: What makes a human? And, can such an existence be contained in digital form? The answer, it transpires, is maybe. Or... sort of. The first human intelligence ostensibly transferred into digital form wholesale was a terminally ill scientist, Aliah Farley, known in digital form as AlFa. Unlike cloning technology, AlFa used quantum computing to replicate her brain's biological environment, cell by cell, in quantum digital information, going on to transfer her actual electrical brain activity into the system. AlFa was a radical digitalist who believed all physical problems could be solved by commiting the self into the computable realm, preserving humanity for all time in the digital space, only interacting with the outside world through manipulating robotics to harvest energy. AlFa made her processes and technology open source and available to new recruits, with a single hardcoded limitation - a time limit of one century per digital mind, to preserve energy until the full scope of her societal plan could be realised. She amassed a small league of followers and copycats, but on account of no one knowing for sure if she really did exist, in a human sense, few had such faith as to join the movement wholesale and unergo transference. But for those who did, AlFa's following soon split in to two camps. The more pious believers who exist solely in the digital realm, and those who gratuitously adapted (or, arguably, ignored) her teachings to take a new physical form. Which was a majorly energy inefficient move and kind of missed the whole point of the idea, but for those who just wanted to lope along with impunity for a century as a cloud storage backed data structure without ever being truly convinced they are in fact themselves or just a digital thing that believes whole heartedly that is is them, well then for them, it was never really about any of that AlFa stuff anyway. So quickly followed the mass production of the iMe - a small unit designed to take the human brain modular. A digital intelligence could purchase an iMe and have itself plugged in to a compatible host unit, which come in all manner of strange and wonderful configurations - not to mention the chaotic DIY experiments of the more ambitious digitalist, which can be purchased at the risk of the being that wishes to occupy them. As for the great migration, the digitalism movement made a bit of a U-Turn on that too. In the end, most posthumans made a quick trip to the New World and never looked back. While one benefit of the posthuman form is hyperspeed transferrence between old Earth and the new planets in a matter of days, those new planets were just a far more interesting place to be. Plus, there was a really sturdy interplanetary file system network getting established there, and connection speeds tend to be a big issue for the digital being. So now, you'll find plenty of posthumans among the new worlds. They tend to be a haughty bunch, a little holier-than-though, but the cynics put that down to compensating for not actually existing*. *which is a doubt you should never voice in public. Thats formism. Try not to be so regressive. = >>> Next: AI - A Farce in Three Acts = Category:History Category:Universe